1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, apparatus, and products for translating between an Ethernet protocol and a Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) protocol.
2. Description of Related Art
Existing Ethernet solutions consist of a device driver and a network adapter. Both communicate through a number of queues, which have individual flow control to define a traffic pattern between driver and network through the adapter, like for example a maximum send rate on the network link. Network Messages to be sent and received are typically buffered in server memory, which is larger than the amount of buffers needed to fulfill server internal flow control requirements. This decouples the end requirements from upper layers in the operating system from network parameters. A Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) network adapter uses the direct proprietary communication to the driver for controlling backpressure to guarantee the network defined traffic flow control parameters. Existing non-CEE network adapters do not have such a mechanism built in, and therefore cannot support the Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) protocol.